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The Good Atheist on gay rights and equality

I’ve been listening to a lot of good podcasts recently, and one of my favourites is The Good Atheist where Ryan Harkness and Jacob Fortin discuss current affairs and what’s wrong with the world, specifically to do with religion.

It’s often very funny, often insightful and sometimes shocking. The episode i heard today, they were discussing some stupid PDF by a religious sect, listing 77 reasons why atheists should be against gay marriage. They laughed about the absurd nonsense supposed logic behind a few of the points in the PDF, and then they talked about how good it is that religion is going to lose on this one. It’ll take time, but people are mostly growing up these days knowing that being gay is not a big deal. I love Jacob’s rants, and this one was an exceptionally good one …

Jacob: The population is getting older, and older people are more religious. But if you’re putting all your faith in them, i got news for you: they’re all gonna die, man! That’s why whenever you look at reports saying, by 2030 (or even earlier than that) many countries, even Canada is included in this, will no longer be considered religious … and that has almost everything to do with the fact that the elderly are the ones that hold on to this. And, unsurprisingly, they’re also the ones who just, overwhelmingly did not like gay people. Because they weren’t part of a culture that saw that as no fucking big deal. They saw it, in fact, as a very giant big deal!

Think about throughout the history of The West, if you want, think about how long gays have had the shitty end of the sexual orientation stick. Hmm? How long has that been going on? This is probably the best time for them, and it’s not even that great! Think about the suicide rates for young gay men, it’s just ridiculously high, right? Cos all they’re told is that they’re fucking giant pieces of shit – and – that’s – better than it used to be. That’s as good as it’s been. That’s fucked up! That is fucked up.

I’m sure in the future, we won’t be part of that future, but i think it will be a great future when we can look at that and finally be ashamed of ourselves, and just put that behind us. Not forget it, but say, “We’re not going to be like this anymore. That’s not going to be us. We’re not going to look at a person’s sexual orientation and say, you don’t deserve to have the same rights as everybody else”.

Ryan: It’s going to take another generation to get the influence of the elderly bigots out of –

Jacob: Yeah, but that’s just here. I mean, how much work do we have to do in Uganda? How much work do we have to do in the rest of Africa, in Asia? You know, in the Middle East. It’s a nightmare! We’re looking at probably another fucking hundred years of this bullshit for everyone to catch up.

But you gotta be that shining city on the hill. You know what i mean? To some degree, you gotta be a beacon of fucking hope for people. Cos the whole world’s not all gonna fall at the same time but goddammit, we can definitely say that we’re on that top. We are the shining motherfucking city on the hill because we’re not the ones going around saying “Oh! If other people have the same rights as me it’ll ruin everything”.

So very well said. These things are important. We have a right to get angry about these issues. I don’t get angry about a lot of things, but equality is a big issue for me, and people who try to deny it make me angry. I’m actually glad that Jacob made such a good rant and i hope nobody minds me transcribing it, because it echoes my own thoughts so clearly.

We have come a long way, we still have a long way to go. We must make a big noise against anyone who is trying to make us go backwards. It gets better. It must get better. It needs to get much better throughout the whole world.